The Keyhole makes observations about consumers, brands, ads, & marketing, through a predictive customer loyalty lens. Most marketing is ineffective to today's bionic consumer, given undifferentiated products, loss of "brandness," & hard to come by profits. Marketers talk about "engagement" but nobody seems to be doing a very good job measuring or integrating it into what they do & it shows! The Keyhole opens a dialogue on this subject & suggests real-world solutions with the marketing community.

Sunday, July 26, 2015

This year’s Brand Keys’ survey of consumer perceptions of
innovative tech brands found consumers’ identification with brands and
innovation has broadened. This year they added seven brands to the list of
innovation leaders for the first time since the survey has been conducted.

While it may be hard to believe, but there was a time when
consumers actually feared of technological innovation. Consumers equated
innovation and technology with a greater likelihood of breakdown or just something
else to go wrong, but clearly not anymore. The 21st century may not have
delivered flying cars, but it is clearly meeting its potential in terms of
providing products and services that better meet consumers’ expectations when
it comes to technology.

This year 4,400 consumers were asked to name companies and
brands that were highest on their lists of technological innovators, with the
following top-20 results:

Apple

Google

Samsung

Amazon

HBO

Netflix

Facebook

SoundCloud

YouTube

LinkedIn

Microsoft

IBM

Uber

Kickstarter

Square

Slack

Tesla

Hulu

Intel

Line

The consumer’s expectation for constant innovation, and the
expansion of technological innovation, is crossing over B2C and B2B lines more
and more. This accounts for the addition of the seven new brands on this year’s
list. Each new brand stands for something that advances the category in which
they compete, with a lot of consumer-to-business crossover. Those seven brands
include:

HBO: Their expansion of HBO GO and willingness to cross
platforms to deliver ever more entertainment.

Kickstarter: A place where global creativity and innovation
has a chance to be cultivated and launched.

Line: A mobile messaging app with a personality that appeals
to consumers’ emotional side of communication.

SoundCloud: Which has become the world’s largest audio
platform.

Square: Giving companies the ability to take care of
business anywhere.

Slack: The collaborative messaging platform for aggregating
all business needs.

Tesla: The electric brand that is making an all-electric car
a reality.

Last year’s list included more traditional’ brands and, of
course, the usual suspects – Apple, Samsung, Google, and Amazon – ranking high,
but clearly consumers have expanded their horizons when it come to looking for
new technologies and innovation.

It’s clear that consumer attitudes toward innovation have changed dramatically
over the past 15 years. Consumers have come to see innovation and change as an
opportunity – not a threat. And, just like Steve Jobs foretold, innovation
truly does distinguish between a leader and a follower.

Find out more about what makes customer loyalty happen and how Brand Keys metrics is able to predict future consumer behavior: brandkeys.com. Visit our YouTube channel to learn more about Brand Keys methodology, applications and case studies.

Sunday, July 19, 2015

As more marketers have
focused on the Millennial Generation with efforts focused on capturing this
cohort’s attentions, major budgets are being planned in the mistaken belief
that Millennials are less brand loyal than other age cohorts, and require
additional attention to create brand preference.

A recent assessment of 12,300
Millennial consumers in 63 categories conducted by Brand Keys, Inc., the New
York City-based brand loyalty and emotional engagement research consultancy (brandkeys.com), proves that emotional values and higher
expectations not only play a greater part in the Millennial decision-process
but that a brand’s ability to deliver on required emotional values trumps
rational ones every time. It turns out that the loyalty bonds created by doing
so for Millennials are stronger than those of other age groups.

Today Emotions Are More Important to Millennials

In 1985, when the first of
what was christened the “Millennial Generation” were about 5 years old the
purchase-decision process was more rational than it was emotional, calculated
to be a ratio of 70:30. That meant rational values having to do pricing,
product quality, numbers of distribution points, and advertising tonnage, were
more important, more leveragable, and more differentiating to consumers than
emotional values.

In 2000 the ratio shifted to
65:35,emotional to rational.

Five years later the ratio reversed
the 1985 numbers, this time 70:30, but with the preponderance of the decision
process turning emotional.

This year, 2015 – as the
first Millennials turn 35 – the decision process is decidedly more emotional,
at a category-generalized ratio of 80:20. Emotional values like customization,
meeting personal emotive needs, the ability to meaningfully “talk” to the brand
that actually “listened,” and a sense of authenticity, became more important in
the brand bonding decision-process as consumers had more and more access to the
Internet and lived hot-wired mobile devices and, consequently, more and more
empowered empowered. Millennials are demanding real reasons to be loyal.

Complicating marketing
efforts, overall, cross-category expectations (examined by generational cohort
and indexed versus a benchmark of 100 to provide comparability) showed
Millennials to hold significantly higher expectations regarding categories and
brands than any other age group as well.

Overall Customer Expectation levels By
Generational Cohort

High Numbers of Millennial Loyalty Leaders

One thing that crosses all
generational cohorts as regards brand loyalty and engagement is that brands
best able to meet the consumers’ expectations for the values – particularly
emotional values – that drive the category are always the brands that show up on the top of consumers’ shopping
lists. A review of the Millennial loyalty leaders in the 63 categories included
in this analysis revealed that 91% of them were the category’s leaders. These
included brands like Apple, Nike, Chipotle, and Old Navy.

Ultimately brands that are able
to stand for the right emotional
values, maintain relevance, and better meet Millennial’s expectations have
shown higher levels of positive
consumer behavior in the marketplace and higher loyalty levels than any other
generational cohort. The secret, of course, is identifying and measuring what
expectations Millennials hold for which emotional values and then planning how
to communicate them to consumers in an engaging manner.

And unfortunately, that’s a
more complex process than just adding more social networking or more
storytelling to the marketing budget.

Find out more about what makes customer loyalty happen and how Brand Keys metrics is able to predict future consumer behavior: brandkeys.com. Visit our YouTube channel to learn more about Brand Keys methodology, applications and case studies.

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

You can’t have missed the fact that the big differentiator
these days for smartphones has become the camera. Consumers have traded last-century
digital compact cameras for smartphones. In fact, some of the smartphone ads
and commercials focus more on the camera aspect of the smartphone than the
smartphone itself.

For those of you who prefer a camera but want the
convenience of something you can keep in your pocket, GoPro, the sports camera
maker, has come up with a new crop of its Hero4 Session, weighing only 2.6
ounces, .9 ounces less than the next lightest model. For those of you looking
for one-touch effortlessness photography, the Hero4 Session has one button to turn
the camera on and begin recording. Oh, and it’s waterproof so it doesn't need a
separate waterproof case like most phones will no matter how smart they are.

That said, digital cameras of any size is a category we no
longer track because, well, it’s become hard to find new customers every year
for our Customer Loyalty Engagement Index. Smartphones, on the other hand, is a
different picture. For those of you about to snap over the overabundance of
smartphone digital camera-specifications, here’s some information to help you stay
focused.

We did a drill-down in the Brand Keys 2015 Customer Loyalty
Engagement Index smartphone category to see which model would-be Ansel Adams and
Annie Leibovitz rated highest, that is to say, which best met their
expectations when it came to the taking-pictures-value of their smartphones.
Here’s a snapshot of the category’s top-10:

Samsung Galaxy S6

Apple iPhone 6+

Apple iPhone 6

Samsung S5

Motorola Moto X

LG G4

Google Nexus 6

Nokia Lumia 1520

Amazon Fire

HTC One M8

You don’t need an 800 mm lens to see that in the near-term,
digital cameras will remain an important differentiator and decision-value for
the smartphone category. We've tracked the category since it entered the
consumer marketplace in 1995, so feel free to check back with us and see what
develops.

Find out more about what makes customer loyalty happen and how Brand Keys metrics is able to predict future consumer behavior: brandkeys.com. Visit our YouTube channel to learn more about Brand Keys methodology, applications and case studies.

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The Keyhole: Peeking at 21st Century Brands

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About Us

Robert Passikoff, founder and president of Brand Keys, is a sought-after speaker and global thought leader on engagement and loyalty. He has pioneered work in these areas, creating the Customer Loyalty Engagement Index and the Sports Fan Loyalty Index. New York University’s communication school has declared Dr. Passikoff “the most-quoted brand consultant in the United States.”